On Samuel Smiles' "Self-Help"

Sometimes our interests lead us to interesting people, and/or the books they write. As a runner who likes reading, I've had the pleasuring of "meeting" all sorts of characters through their books, including Arthur Lydiard, Percy Cerutty, and Timothy Noakes to name a few. Their "company" is almost always highly stimulating, and seems to waken within me a kind of restless, adventuring energy, even if I don't agree with all the ideas they espouse. Indeed, I find it is not only what a book says, but also what it means to me that defines a work's value. That may sound a bit cheesy and "new age," but we'd probably be fools to underestimate the potency of emotions a book or idea inspires.

With that in mind, I'd like to discuss a work I've recently started reading entitled "Self-Help" (1859), by the nineteenth century Scottish author Samuel Smiles.

My first "meeting" with Mr. Smiles dates back almost two years ago, when an excerpt from "Self-Help" appeared in a reader for a class on European intellectual history. I found it mildly ironic that an author espousing so much confidence in positive and "can-do" attitudes should be named "Smiles." Despite the wry jokes I and my classmates made at his expense, Mr. Smiles' captured my attention fully and didn't let it go until the excerpt finished. It began like this: 

"'Heaven helps those who help themselves,' is a well-worn maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the root of all 
genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigor and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless" (Samuel Smiles, Self-Help [1859] in Franklin Le van Baumer, Main Currents in Western Thought, 4th Edition, 512).

The opening paragraph felt like jumping into a cold pool; it snapped my senses awake, and recalled my mind from its wondering. All the authors mentioned above tend to have that effect on me in their work. Like Lydiard, Cerutty, and Noakes, Smiles got me thinking, which seems to me a good thing. 

Just in this opening paragraph, Smiles touches a number of themes we've examined on this blog before: on learning optimism, changing society without the government, and growing through discomfort toward resilience. The basic idea here seems to be that people accomplish far more when the things which motivate them comes from within rather than without; that we tend to become helpless when not left to figure out our own problems. As we concluded in the post "From discomfort to resilience," there appears to be a point at which a little support from without can go a long way in helping someone learn from difficult situations; that we grow when we learn to help ourselves, but a little support can make the lesson more wholesome and less traumatizing. 

In a later passage Smiles goes on to say: 

"Daily experience shows that it is energetic individualism which produces the most powerful effects upon the life and action of others, and really constitutes the best practical education. Schools, academies, and colleges, give but the merest beginnings of culture in comparison with it. Far more influential is the life-education daily given in our homes, in the streets, behind counters, in workshops, at the loom and plough, in counting-houses and manufactories, and in the busy haunts of men. This is that finishing instruction as members of society, which Schiller designated the 'education of the human race,' consisting in action, conduct, self-culture, self-control, -all that tends to discipline a man truly, and fit him for the proper performance of the duties and business of life,-a kind of education not to be learnt in books or acquired by any amount of mere literacy training" (Source).


The main idea from this passage centers on the value of "life education," which is to say the education we get outside school, by doing complex things while living in a complex world. I've grown rather sympathetic to this idea in recent years, if for no other reason than I've had to teach myself a lot of new things simply by doing them, messing up, and doing better the next time. Blogging is one example of an activity which I found (and still find!) challenging, but which through practice, trial-and-error, and a  little patience has become an activity which I very much like to do, even as I recognize that it is a practice and process without end. We learn many things in school, but we learn many from our experiences and failures in life. As Mr. Smiles says elsewhere, "It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done."

In the end, I like "Self-Help" because it describes a mechanism by which we tend grow as people; that is, by learning how to help ourselves overcome difficult situations, thereby becoming more independent. It seems to capture a sense of how some types of difficult situations leave us personally stronger, much like a strenuous workout leaves a body stronger. Yet as a body which is always worked but never rested does not not become stronger, so I suspect that a person left to always fend for themselves may not  grow as person, but instead collapse under the strain of an unsupported burden. So at times a little support is good as we learn, grow, and by experience come to help ourselves. 

Happy Friday, friends :)